Last December’s contest over what theme would get discussed in the fifth Wednesday post, as I’ve noted here more than once already, was unusually lively even by the standards of my lively and eccentric commentariat. What’s more, all three of the leading contenders were themes I wanted to write about anyway. Long before the contest…
Tag: imagination
Talking Back to Flying Heads
As a writer with an unruly muse, I’ve gotten used to accepting inspiration no matter the quarter from which it arrives. Even for me, though, this essay is a little odd. We’re going to be talking about one of the weirdest movies of the early 1970s, which is of course saying something; about a widely…
Writing as Microcosm 4: A Conversation with the Reader
I wish I could say that the spontaneity trap we discussed two weeks ago was the only pitfall that has to be avoided on the way to a successful career as a writer—or, for that matter, on the way to a successful life. Here as elsewhere, the writing business offers a convenient microcosm of life…
Futures That Work
Among the most curious features of the current predicament of industrial society is that so much of it was set out in great detail so many decades ago. Just at the moment I’m not thinking of the extensive literature on resource depletion that started appearing in the 1950s, which set out in painstaking detail the…
The Future At Five A.M.
Yes, I know that bullets are flying and bombs falling in Ukraine as I type these words. Plenty of people are catching the latest variants of Covid-19; curiously enough, people who got vaccinated for that virus are catching it at a much higher rate than those that didn’t get the jab, but we don’t have…
Reimagining Political Economy
Over the last couple of months I’ve discussed the way that contemporary industrial societies struggle under the weight of a disastrous failure of imagination. That’s among the most potent and disturbing political facts of our time. Even though the existing order of society has proven to be a miserable failure in terms of every human…
The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Three: Co-Creating the Future
As I write these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war has raged for a week. To a great many people, crises like these make the theme of my recent posts here—the potential of the human imagination—seem wholly irrelevant. That’s a common mistake, but it’s still a mistake. To begin with, let’s please remember that wars and the…
The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Two: No More Secondhand Futures
In a post here two weeks ago I discussed the disastrous failure of imagination on the part of the industrial world’s governing classes. Since then—well, let’s just say that for connoisseurs of elite cluelessness, it’s a target-rich environment out there. We’ll choose one such target more or less at random. Last week’s news was briefly…
The Revolt of the Imagination, Part One: Notes on Belbury Syndrome
Maybe it’s true that life really does imitate literature. Over the last week or so, certainly, a detail from one of my favorite works of imaginative fiction played out at least twice in the real world, with microphones live and cameras rolling. I’m thinking here first of German Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, who promoted…